Fact-checking the Texas energy-failure blame game

This week, all eyes have been on Texas. An unprecedented winter storm left 4 million people without power across the state, and put nearly half of all Texans under a boil-water advisory.

Initial reports from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state's power grid, suggested frozen wind turbines were partially to blame. Though ERCOT's report on Sunday said that limited natural gas supplies had also crippled the power grid, many Republican officials seized on frozen wind turbines and solar panels as primary culprits behind the outages.

On Tuesday evening, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, told Fox News host Sean Hannity that due to the weather "our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis."

Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw listed "frozen wind turbines" as a major reason for the statewide outages. "This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn't there when you need it," Crenshaw said in a Twitter thread Tuesday.